The ability to deliver content over an electronic communications network has resulted in a variety of applications of network technology. In office environments, local area networks (LANs) are delivering software applications, electronic files and messages to office workers. LANs are used by businesses, military groups, educational facilities and other organizations to facilitate the delivery of many types of content between organization members. Wide area networks, such as the Internet, provide additional or larger scale opportunities to deliver content.
For example, the Internet is used by a variety of business, organizations, governments and individuals to deliver various types of content to Internet enabled devices, including website content for displaying a website on a user's computer, as well as digitally encoded content files. Some Internet websites provide opportunites to download files containing digitally encoded text (such as papers, forms, Patents), pictures, images or computer games. In some websites, larger files, such as video files, video games or music files may be downloaded by a user. As a result, a variety of content delivery services are presently provided over communication networks, such as the Internet.
The speed and efficiency at which network users may download content over a network can be largly dependent upon the size of the content files, the number of users simultaneously using the content delivery service and the speed and efficiency of the servers and other system components used by the content delivery service. As the number of users of a content delivery service increases, the delays experienced by users attempting to download content files can increase, unless the service operator provides sufficiently fast and efficent servers and other system components. However, robust servers and system components are expensive to obtain and operate. Thus, with many Internet sites, users may experience significant delays in downloading content files, especially during higher traffic periods and with sites that deliver large content files.
In addition, the delivery of large files can require a large storage capacity and bandwidth, as compared to smaller files. These factors can render conventional systems impractical for downloading large numbers of large files. Thus, typical conventional systems may be impractical or inefficient for providing large-scale services for delivery of large files, such as movie files, music files, video game files or other large program or data files, to users on a network. Accordingly, there is an industry demand for an efficient manner of providing an on-line service for deliverying large numbers of large files, for example, to many users over a wide region.